terça-feira, 27 de dezembro de 2011

Tim Kasser: Human Identity & Environmental Challenges

Tim Kasser, Professor and Chair of Psychology at Knox College and author of The High Price of Materialism and other works related to consumerism and well being.

Despite some important successes, the efforts of the environmental movement have thus far failed to activate the kinds of personal and social changes necessary to meet the many ecological challenges we face. A growing body of psychological research suggests that if these efforts incorporated more knowledge about human identity (including our values, our sense of social identity, and the ways we cope when threatened), greater progress towards a more sustainable (and socially just) world might be forthcoming.

"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London

In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):

The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]

McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15]http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html